Better Callouts Documentation

30.03.2025
Info

Better Callouts is an Obsidian plugin that lets you create, edit, and manage custom callout styles visually — no CSS knowledge needed. It handles everything for you, including automatic snippet generation.

✨ Features

  • 🎨 Visual editor for creating callouts
  • 🧠 Custom color, text color, and optional border for the callouts
  • 💾 Generates valid Obsidian CSS snippets
  • 🔄 Automatically keeps .obsidian/snippets/betterCallouts.css up to date
  • âš¡ Templater integration for easy inserting custom callouts in notes

🚀 How to Use

1. Enable the Plugin

  • Go to the plugin folder of your vault: .obsidian/plugins/ (if it doesnt exist yet create the folder)
  • Clone my plugin repository into the plugin folder with this command: 
    https://github.com/hannesschacherl/better-callouts.git
  • Enable the plugin in Settings → Community Plugins
  • Add a new Callout (this makes the plugin add everything to the CSS-File)
  • Go to Settings → Appearance Scroll down to CSS-Snippets
  • Enable BetterCallouts (This applies all styles created by the plugin to your notes)

If you use Obsidian Publish:

  • Add the changes from the .obsidian/snippets/betterCallouts.css to your publish.css file for them to work on the published Obsidian
  • I recommend setting up a file watcher that watches the .obsidian/snippets/ folder and runs a shell script to merge the files into your publish.css when detecting changes

2. Create a New Callout

  • Go to Settings → Better Callouts
  • Click the + button to add a new callout
  • A callout with the name c-new appears
  • Fill out the following fields:
    • Label: Name of the callout (e.g. "Warning")
    • Color: Background color
    • Text: Text color
    • Border: (optional) Enable a left border
    • Border Color: (only if Border is set to yes) Add a color for the border
  • The callout preview will update in real time.
  • Your callout will be saved automatically and added to the generated CSS snippet.
  • You can use all callouts that are inside your settings just like native Obsidian callouts

Accepted colors:

  • Named colors (e.g. red, blue, darkgreen)
  • HEX values (e.g. #ffcc00, #123456)
  • RGB and RGBA (e.g. rgb(255, 0, 0), rgba(0, 128, 255, 0.2))
  • HSL and HSLA (e.g. hsl(200, 100%, 50%), hsla(0, 100%, 50%, 0.5))
  • Obsidian variables (e.g. var(--text-accent), var(--color-base-40))
Warning

if you use something like var(--some-var) and forget the closing ) other callouts may stop working.
Input validation is planned for the future but currently not active.

3. Where Is everything?

The Plugin uses the following files:

Vault
├── .obsidian
│   ├── plugins
│   │   ├── better-callouts
│   │   │   ├── data.json
│   │   │   ├── main.js
│   │   │   └── manifest.json
│   ├── snippets
│   │   ├── betterCallouts.css

plugins > better-callouts > main.js: here is the logic for everything this plugin does

plugins > better-callouts > data.json: here are all your custom callouts stored

plugins > better-callouts > manifest.json: tells obsidian information about this plugin

snippets > betterCallouts.css: this is the automatically generated CSS-File

Inserting templates

Now you've set up the plugin to work for all your custom callouts.

You can insert them into your file using code like this: 

> [!c-my-callout] Title
> Content

The Title ([!c-my-callout]) for the callout you want to add is displayed in the settings screen of this plugin.

Even better Inserting

If you want an even easier way for inserting the callouts you can:

  • press CTRL / CMD + P (to open the command palette)
  • search for Better Callouts: Insert better callout (only works when in edit mode)
  • select the callout you want to insert from the modal